Perhaps the first thing to strike you when watching Kasper Holten’s production of Don Giovanni, which returns to the Covent Garden stage this summer, is how the physical set is quite literally a blank canvas – the base for another, virtual set that seems to paint itself on in light before your eyes.

The first breaktaking visual effect occurs during the overture, when the names of the women in Giovanni’s notorious catalogue of sexual conquests begin to write themselves on the set, as if scripted by many invisible hands. Finally, Leporello enters, holding a pencil, and scribbles the name of his master’s latest conquest, or victim, depending on your point of view: ‘Anna’.

Giovanni’s catalogue is the starting point for the visual themes of the production. From this, the design team – video designer Luke Halls, set designer Es Devlin and lighting designer Bruno Poet – created this effect. Halls commissioned calligraphers to write out each name in Giovanni’s not-so-little black book, the sum of which is 2,065, if you add up all those detailed by Leporello during his Catalogue Aria. Halls then animated each of these scripts to look as if they are being handwritten in real time.

But how does a video animation find its way on to the set? The secret lies in a piece of specialist equipment, a small black box known simply as a d3, which is a combination of software and hardware. As well as being a programmable ‘brain’ that enables a designer to create virtual three-dimensional simulations from video-based installations, it can also send these images to a projector to play back live on set.

Both programming and then operating the d3 unit during the performance is Gareth Shelton, sound and broadcast deputy manager, who works closely with the design team and the production manager, Will Harding.

So how does the singer playing Leporello know where and when to start writing when he appears on stage? The answer, says Gareth, in this case is not so much technological trickery as plenty of rehearsal time. ‘There are clear musical cues when he should write. In the first production, Alex Esposito practices writing the script over and over again, in the right sequence to the music, until it was perfect. And, although this is invisible to the audience, if you look carefully in the right place, the word ‘Anna’ is penciled on, ever so faintly to act as a guide.’

Having a set that’s entirely painted by light throws up other challenges too – how do you light the singers without washing out the set around them? ‘The set is effectively lit by the video, with some regular lighting enhancement,’ explains Gareth, ‘and then the singers are tracked by several followspots.’ But perhaps the cleverest and most complicated effect goes almost unnoticed by the audience. At several points the set, which is cube-shaped, starts to rotate, and the projections of doors and windows rotate with it, seamlessly obeying the laws of perspective and foreshortening and changing shape. It looks so natural you could overlook it, but it is in fact fiendishly complicated, based on constant feedback between the motor moving the set and the d3 unit, which detects the position of the set and adjusts the image it projects accordingly. ‘If it didn’t work, you would know, but when it does it looks just like a regular painted set that’s rotating, albeit enhanced with some beautiful animations.’

Gareth achieved this by spending several weeks programming the d3 unit with Luke Halls’s video designs, taking into account the size of the set, the angle of rotation and distance of the projector from the set. There was plenty of time spent in music rehearsals too, making sure every musical cue aligned with the visual effects. With such painstaking attention to detail, Gareth admits he has probably memorized every note in the opera.

Gareth’s biggest challenge after the revival of the production however, will come when The Royal Opera takes Don Giovanni on tour to Tokyo and Osaka in September this year. ‘We have very little time to reconfigure the show in Tokyo,’ he says. ‘It is the same set, but bear in mind it’s a different-shaped theatre, with different angles, heights and positions. We then go to Osaka, where we have just one day to get it right.’

Don Giovanni runs 12 June-3 July 2015. Tickets go on sale to the Friends of Covent Garden on 4 March with General booking opening on 31 March 2015.
The production is staged with generous philanthropic support from the Danish Research Foundation and The Royal Opera House Endowment fund. It is a co-production with Houston Grand Opera.

An exhibition showing the making of Don Giovanni is currently on display in the main entrance foyer of the Royal Opera House. The free exhibition melds video, designs and costumes to offer unique insight into the process of staging this production.

This article was originally published in the Royal Opera House Magazine, received quarterly by theFriends of Covent Garden.

'What is great about this exhibition is that it’s a thing in itself,' says Es. 'Exhibitions like this can often end up as footnotes to a live event, which is frustrating. But walking into this exhibition, the artefacts are intriguing in themselves. That they are traces of a production is just one aspect of what’s involved.'

For the exhibition, Es envisaged melding the video design used in the production with conventional video in order to tell the story of the creative people involved in a major new opera production. To achieve this, the process of creating the costumes and dyeing them with ‘ink stains’ was filmed, and the footage projected onto dresses in the main entrance foyer. You can see the full process of dyeing the costumes and the making of Donna Anna's dress on our YouTube channel.

'The projections in the exhibition posed several technical challenges,' says Tom Nelson, ROH Creative Producer. 'We are working in a Grade 1 listed building, in an area with lots of daylight and limited space. There were also concerns about conservation due to the heat dissipation from the projector.’ The exhibition uses a new bright projector by Casio that works at short distances and uses LED-hybrid technology to minimize heat.

'The end result is a really strong visual narrative that has never been achieved before in a Royal Opera House exhibition,' says Tom.

Exhibitions can be visited for free during normal daytime opening at the Royal Opera House, Monday-Friday, 10am–3.30pm. Before making a special visit, please call +44(0)20 7304 4000 to check that the Front of House spaces are open.

When Riccardo, the hero of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, is warned that someone will kill him at his masked ball, he really should take heed. For one thing is certain in opera – parties are bad for your health.

Mozart certainly realized the potency of parties. In the masked ball in Don Giovanni the anarchic Giovanni tries to seduce Zerlina to the sound of three dances performed simultaneously. When he’s caught he barely escapes with his life. Less violent but equally arresting is the Act II finale to Così fan tutte, where Dorabella and Fiordiligi’s marriage to their ‘Albanian’ lovers collapses in startling revelations and recriminations.

Bellini and Donizetti were particularly drawn to the disastrous wedding party. Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor arrives like an avenging fury to prevent Lucia’s forced marriage, and Elvira in I puritani goes mad when her groom disappears. But it didn’t always have to be a wedding – surely the most devastating bel canto party of all comes in Act II of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, where the anti-heroine poisons six noblemen – including, unwittingly, her son.

Verdi loved operatic parties. They gave him the opportunity to deploy great entertainment music, and he knew that the best way to deliver curses and accusations is against a background of frivolity. Take Monterone’s chilling curse inRigoletto during the Duke’s hedonistic banquet – or Alfredo’s terrible denunciation of Violetta in La traviata, amid Spanish dances and gambling. Parties also prove perfect environments for murder, in Un ballo in maschera and also in Les Vêpres siciliennes, where Guy de Montfort survives an assassination attempt at a ball in Act III only (innocently) to precipitate a massacre at his son’s wedding in Act V.

Terrible secrets are revealed at celebrations in Wagner’s operas; the most dramatic comes in Götterdämmerung, when Brünnhilde breaks off her forced wedding to Gunther to accuse Siegfried of treachery. But this is nothing to the chaos of King Herod’s feast in Richard Strauss’s Salome, which culminates in the heroine embracing John the Baptist’s severed head.

Russian operatic parties are powder kegs waiting for an inevitable spark. Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin brings about disaster at Tatyana’s name-day ball by taunting his friend Lensky, who challenges him to a duel. Marfa in Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride is poisoned at her engagement party (by an admirer who believes he’s administering a love potion) and then forced to renounce her fiancé and become the Tsar’s wife. But the prize for the most debauched Russian party undoubtedly goes to the drunken wedding orgy in Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, where Katerina and Sergei are arrested for the murder of Katerina’s first husband.

There are plenty of gruesome celebrations in 20th-century opera, too. It’s a dance that finally sends Berg's Wozzeck into mental collapse, while the elegant party in Act III of his Lulu ends with a stock exchange crash and the heroine fleeing the police. Schoenberg (Moses und Aron), Schreker (Die Gezeichneten) and Henze (Die Bassariden) all explored the destructive power of orgies, and Britten provides a terrifying picture of mass hysteria in the Act III dance of Peter Grimes. Festivities don’t get any better in our own century: in Turnage's Anna Nicole the heroine’s attempt to host the party of a lifetime ends with her husband’s death and ultimately her ruin.

All this destruction begs the question - can a party in opera ever be enjoyable? Well, the townspeople in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg have a good time (apart from Beckmesser). And if Sharp-Ears’s wedding in Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixenis anything to go by, animals in opera are able to celebrate with the unadulterated joy that so often eludes their human counterparts. But it’s operetta that chiefly celebrates the more cheerful side of partying: the ensembles in praise of friendship and champagne in Johan Strauss II's Die Fledermaus and the final scenes of Franz Lehár's Die lustige Witwe remind us that parties can – just occasionally – actually be joyful occasions.

Un ballo in maschera runs 18 December 2014–17 January 2015. Tickets are still available. The production is a co-production with Theater Dortmund and Scottish Opera and is given with generous philanthropic support from the Royal Opera House Endowment Fund.

La traviata runs 18 May–4 July 2015. Tickets go on general sale 27 January 2015. The production is generously supported by Rolex.

Don Giovanni runs 12 June–3 July 2015. Tickets go on general sale 31 March 2015. The production is given with generous philanthropic support from the Royal Opera House Endowment Fund and is a co-production with Houston Grand Opera.

Francis Poulenc took the opportunity with the nearly all-female cast for his opera Dialogues des Carmélites to pay homage to some of his favourite operatic women. We take a look at the five models that inspired his Carmelite leading ladies:

Sister Constance – inspired by Zerlina from Mozart's Don Giovanni (soubrette)
Sister Constance is the youngest nun. She is blessed with a radiant happiness, even when facing the nuns' terrible fate. Her light, agile voice has its precursor in Zerlina, Mozart's bubbly peasant girl. Though Constance would never dream of getting up to the same shenanigans as Zerlina, her exuberance and optimism make them spiritual sisters.

Mother Marie – inspired by Amneris from Verdi's Aida (mezzo-soprano)
Mother Marie is a pillar of strength in the convent community. Though shy and reserved, she is devoted to the sisters in her care and would make any sacrifice for them – when Blanche runs away it is Mother Marie who goes to find her, and attempts to keep her from harm. Verdi's jealous princess Amneris has no such kindness, but her passion and single-minded determination can be heard in the richness of Mother Marie's velvety mezzo-soprano.

Madame de Croissy – inspired by Kundry from Wagner's Parsifal (contralto)
Madame de Croissy is the Prioress of the convent when Blanche arrives. She is strict and has high expectations for her sisters, but her loving compassion becomes quickly apparent in her first interview with Blanche. However, her death at the end of Act I is filled with pain, her powerful voice groaning and railing against God's cruelty. Although Poulenc has significantly decreased the vocal range of Wagner's sorceress to represent the Prioress's old age, her mix of authority and anguish owes a clear debt to the doomed Kundry.

Madame Lidoine – inspired by Desdemona from Verdi's Otello (lirico spinto soprano)
Madame Lidoine is the new prioress. It is she who must guide the community of nuns when the police of the French Revolution arrest them; it is she who eventually leads them to the scaffold. Poulenc writes her music of great simplicity and beauty, instantly creating a sense of her calmness and serenity. Verdi's angelic heroine Desdemona shares Madame Lidoine's faith and goodness, and her Act IV 'Ave Maria' is directly referenced in Poulenc's own setting of the prayer for Madame Lidoine and her sisters in Act II – anticipating both women's needless and brutal deaths.

Blanche – inspired by Thaïs from Massenet's Thaïs (lyric soprano)
Poulenc's heroine Blanche is the spiritual heart of Dialogues des Carmélites. We feel her love for the old Prioress, her fear of death and her horror at the fate awaiting the community – until she finally chooses to sacrifice herself with them. Her breathless agitation throughout much of the opera recalls Massenet's writing for Thaïs in Act II of his opera, where this courtesan – so cool and controlled in the first act – suddenly realizes how vulnerable she is. Thaïs's transformation in the final act into a self-denying saint is compressed by Poulenc into a tiny, simple Gloria sung by Blanche on the scaffold, filled with grace and beauty.

Dialogues des Carmélites runs 29 May–11 June 2014. Tickets are still available.The production, originally from De Nederlandse Opera, Amsterdam, is given with generous philanthropic support from Mrs Aline Foriel-Destezet, The Taylor Family Foundation and The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

Soprano Elizabeth Watts is the focus of a specially-commissioned film following her through the process of learning, rehearsing and performing the role of Zerlina in Kasper Holten's Royal Opera production of Don Giovanni.

The film, originally shown as part of Inside Opera LIVE, offers a unique behind-the-scenes glimpse at what it takes to learn a new role and achieve the high standards required of a professional opera singer.

To see more footage like this, subscribe to the Royal Opera House YouTube channel:

Mozart’s classic tragicomedy follows the tale of the charismatic but nefarious Don Giovanni. Irresistibly charming, he seduces a stream of women accompanied by his long-suffering servant Leporello. However, when he commits murder, his luck begins to change. Find out more about the character of Don Giovanni.